Pamela FurstSenior Manager, Customer Success

"Focus on the outcomes you're driving towards, not the outputs" Milan Thakker | Product, Jellyfish

Name: "Focus on the outcomes you're driving towards, not the outputs" Milan Thakker | Product, Jellyfish
Uploaded: 2022-08-24T14:00:22+00:00
Duration: 28 s
Channel: Pamela Furst
Description: In this brief excerpt, the speaker argues that relying on metrics causes systems to game the measurement, optimizing for the metric rather than the true…

24 Aug 2022 · 0 min

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In this brief excerpt, the speaker argues that relying on metrics causes systems to game the measurement, optimizing for the metric rather than the true goal. Metrics are described as inherently flawed because they incentivize cheating. To counteract this, the speaker recommends shifting attention from the measured outputs to the actual outcomes the organization aims to achieve, thereby aligning incentives with genuine value creation.

Regardless of what we measure, what we've learned here is the system is going to cheat. If we pick a metric and we say we're going to follow it, all of a sudden the system is starting to say, hey, I'm going to find the best way I possibly can to optimize for that one metric. So metrics stink, right? We should just never use them. Why would we ever focus on them? Well, there's actually a way to disincentivize the system around this. To disincentivize this cheating, what you want to do is you want to focus on the outcomes that you're actually driving towards over the outputs that you're measuring.